I don’t want to face that crushing pain. That heartache. Those adorable first-grade grins, some with their first missing tooth. Those grieving, heart-wrenching parents whose worlds have stopped, who make us all think, “How will they ever survive this?”

I would prefer to focus on something frivolous, something merry and bright, something to make us feel like everything is fine, even though it so clearly is not. I want to write about holiday lights and the best Savannah home decorations. I want to write about the annual wacky Neiman Marcus fantasy gift catalog paired with a requisite plea for less materialism.

I want to take the equivalent to a literary shot (or six) of Maker’s Mark and simply forget that unbelievable and inexplicable heartbreak of Sandy Hook ever happened.

I want to ignore Newtown because looking at it, really looking at it, hurts and terrifies.

I want to forget that in mere moments — how long was it, three minutes? three minutes — a 20-year-old man with a .223-caliber Bushmaster AR-15 Remington semiautomatic rifle killed 20 children and six adults who devoted their lives to educating children.

In three minutes.

I want to stop whispering with incredulity at the gun-lobbyists on the TV screen: “Why rally in favor of assault weapons? Why does anyone need to have an assault weapon that can fire 100 shots in one minute?”

I want to subscribe to the “this-would-never-happen-in-my-town” theory.

Or the more factual theory that these school shootings are very rare.

They are.

But that doesn’t seem to help when reading those 26 names and thinking of the parents who have to wake up to Christmas morning without their child.

I want to subscribe to the single-cause, single-solution theory because that makes it seem like we can end these shootings if we focus on one solvable problem: Assault weapons; lack of mental health care; lapses in school security; inadequate background checks.

But as parents, how can any of us downplay Newtown as a random aberration or dismiss as something we just can’t understand?

How can we blame it on one cause or shrug our shoulders about what to do?

It would be so much more comforting to not think or not write or not cry or not choke with tears about the pain of Newtown.

No, I don’t want to write about Newtown.

But as President Obama so aptly said at the Sandy Hook prayer vigil: “We can do better.”

“Surely, we can do better than this. If there is even one step we can take to save another child, or another parent, or another town, from the grief that has visited Tucson, and Aurora, and Oak Creek, and Newtown, and communities from Columbine to Blacksburg before that — then surely we have an obligation to try.”

We can do better.

We can face this unbelievable sadness and find solutions.

Starting by asking ourselves as parents what is propelling young white males — some of whom, as in the Sandy Hook shooting, come from privileged homes — to commit these mass shootings.

As Harvard College administrator Erika Christakis wrote in Time after the Aurora shootings: “Why aren’t we talking about the glaring reality that acts of mass murder (and, indeed, every single kind of violence) are overwhelmingly perpetrated by men? Pointing out that fact may seem politically incorrect or irrelevant, but our silence about the huge gender disparity of such violence may be costing lives.”

What can we as parents do about that glaring reality? What are we missing? Where are we failing our sons?

Yes, this holiday season, we’d all prefer to pretend that Newtown was just a nightmare.

But instead Newtown’s pain is very much a reality.

Let us invest the energy and honesty to understand the torment that causes a young man to inflict so much pain and do our part to fix those problems.

Even though we can be distracted by the holidays and forget the Sandy Hook sadness for a few moments, the parents of the slain first graders cannot.

Let us show the grieving Newtown parents that their worlds aren’t the only ones that will never be the same again.